India aims to engage with partner nations and multi-national maritime constructs to develop “comprehensive maritime domain awareness and share information on vessels of interest with all stakeholders,” Deputy Chief of Naval Staff Vice Admiral Sanjay Mahindru said on September 14. He said that since the establishment of the Information Fusion Centre - Indian Ocean Region (IFC-IOR), located in Gurugram, the centre had emerged as a prominent hub of maritime security information in the region in a short span of time.
Speaking at the Maritime Information Sharing Workshop being organised by the Navy, he said, “The aim of this workshop is to afford cohesive and collective responses to the many maritime security challenges that the Indian Ocean Region faces and develop a robust functional level understanding amongst participants.”
The workshop would also take you through a tabletop maritime security exercise where all the participants would be able to work together as a team to prepare plans in response to the various maritime contingencies, Vice Admiral Mahindru said.
The IFC-IOR inaugurated on December 2018 hosts 12 International Liaison Officers (ILOs) from Australia, France, Italy, Japan, Maldives, Mauritius, Myanmar, Seychelles, Singapore, Sri Lanka, the U.K. and the U.S. and actively collaborates with 42 other maritime security constructs and another 25 partner countries.
The workshop, hosted by IFC-IOR brings together 31 countries of the Indian Ocean Rim Association (IORA) and the Djibouti Code of Conduct/ Jeddah Amendment (DCoC/JA), from September 14 to 16, the Navy said in a statement.
Contingency plans
The second day of the workshop will be dedicated to a scenario-based maritime security exercise that would highlight the value of collaboration and information sharing to participants and encourage preparation of contingency plans to counter maritime security and safety threats, the Navy said. On the third day, a dedicated workshop will be conducted exclusively for DCoC/JA countries towards refining Standard Operating Procedures for their own information sharing network.
The IOR is vital to prosperity of a large part of humanity with more than half of the world’s container ships and over two-thirds of the world’s crude oil shipment passing through the region, the Deputy Chief noted and referred to maritime threats such as terrorism, piracy, human and contraband trafficking, illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing, arms running and poaching which pose clear challenges to maritime safety and security.
“These challenges are unique both in there nature and complexity. Any response to these challenges requires enhanced situational awareness of the maritime domain so as to enable security agencies to function effectively,” he stated, adding that at the same time the scale, scope and transnational nature of maritime activity makes it difficult for any country to address these challenges individually.
